Lot 193
Treasury 4, no. 561 (‘Nine Likenesses’)
HK$312,500

Glass, ink, and watercolours; with a concave lip and a recessed convex foot surrounded by a protruding rounded foot rim; painted with a continuous waterside scene two scholars strolling along the shore with the sun just half hidden by distant hills and a boat with reefed sails lies offshore, while a scholar sits in the window of a country residence built on stilts in the water and while a ferry is punted across the water and the sails of three more boats are visible in the distance, the side with the sun inscribed with a title in clerical script, Jiuru tu 九如圖 (‘A Painting of the Nine Likenesses’) followed by Jiachen dong, fang Hua Yishan shi fa, Kong An fangbo daren junjian 甲辰冬仿華易山氏法孔安方伯大人鈞鑒 (‘Painted by Ding Shangyu in the winter of the year jiachen, following the method of Hua Yishan, for the worthy examination of the honourable Provincial Administration Commissioner Kong An’) with one seal of the artist, Erzhong, in negative seal script
Ding Erzhong, Nanjing, winter 1904
Height: 6.39 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.55/1.49 cm
Stopper: tourmaline; vinyl collar

Provenance:
Arts of China, Hong Kong (1985)

Published:
Ceramics, May–June 1986, p. 142, fig. 4
Kleiner 1987, no. 263
JICSBS, Spring 1988, front cover
Galeries Lafayette 1990, p. 11
Kleiner, Yang, and Shangraw 1994, no. 306
Kleiner 1995, no. 394
Chinese Snuff Bottles in the Collection of Mary and George Bloch (illustrated folder), Israel Museum, Jerusalem, July 1997
Treasury 4, no. 561

Exhibited:
Sydney L. Moss Ltd, London, October 1987
Galeries Lafayette, Paris, April 1990
Creditanstalt, Vienna, May–June 1993
Hong Kong Museum of Art, March–June 1994
National Museum of Singapore, November 1994–February 1995
British Museum, London, June–November 1995
Israel Museum, Jerusalem, July–November 1997
Christies, London, 1999

The source of the ‘Nine Likenesses’ is ‘Heaven’s Blessings,’ a poem collected in Shijing (‘The Book of Songs’). The two stanzas that refer to the ‘Nine Likenesses’ are as follows, as translated by Arthur Waley, with the restoration of one like he dropped and the nine ‘likes’ in italics:

天保定爾，以莫不興。如山如阜，如岡如陵。如川之方至，以莫不增。······ˉ如月之恒，如日之升。如南山之壽，不騫不崩。如松柏之茂，儀不爾或承。
May Heaven guard and keep you,
Cause there to be nothing in which you do not rise higher,
Like the mountains, like the uplands,
Like the ridges, [like] the great ranges,
Like a stream coming down in flood;
In nothing not increased.
.............
To be like the moon advancing to its full,
Like the sun climbing the sky,
Like the everlastingness of the southern hills,
Without failing or falling,
Like the pine tree, the cypress in their verdure —
All these blessings may you receive!

This is another of Ding’s great masterpieces and one of his finest landscape paintings; its quality is matched by others, including several in this collection, but never bettered. It represents Ding at the height of his technical and aesthetic skills. Every stroke, every wash, every element of the landscape is achieved with consummate confidence and perfection. One only has to look at the superbly washed distant line of peaks set beneath the inscription to grasp the transcendent quality of the painting. In Chinese painting, such distant peaks were often achieved by loading the brush with water and then dipping just the point into ink or colour and drawing the obliquely held body of the brush along the shapes of the peaks so that the darker ink defines their upper limits and the stroke fades to a watery wash to represent mist at the foot of the peaks. It is difficult enough to achieve with such perfection with a brush on paper, but a bamboo pen cannot be loaded with varying ink tones in this manner, nor can it be held horizontal to the paper in order to allow the ink tones to modulate naturally from dark to light. To achieve the same thing in a snuff bottle, the artist must wet the area in the shape of the peaks, and then, while the area is still wet, add dark ink or colour just along the upper lines of the peaks. Here it is breathtakingly well done. Every other element of the painting is as convincingly and compellingly painted.

The rock forms are wonderfully delineated with fluid modelling strokes that express themselves as forceful soloists in the aesthetic dance of the brush. Another of the inner languages that Ding commanded so well here is to be seen in the colouring of the rocks, which have been done primarily to abstract ends. Some are blue, some sepia, and some a mixture of the two, but if we mentally close down pictorial content and read them as abstract form they are, again, breath-taking. The paler sepia rocks also pick up the dance of the foreground trunks of trees in this abstract equation, and the shallows and reed banks form a horizontal foil to the jutting rock forms.

Here Ding signs with his other name, Ding Shangyu. This, or its shorter form where the ‘Shang’ is implied but not written, appears in the very first year of his recorded works, 1893 (see Hui and Sin 1994, no. 207). In some books on seal carving, which was another of Ding’s skills, the name is given as Shanggeng 尚庚, but it is quite clear from the many occurrences on his snuff bottles that the correct reading is Ding Shangyu 尚庾. Even more rarely, the name is written Shanggeng 上庚, but this does not appear on the snuff bottles or on Ding’s few known paintings and calligraphy.

This is not the Sotheby’s sale catalogue. This is a product of Hugh Moss for the purposes of this website. For the catalogue details please refer to Sotheby’s website or request a copy of a printed sale catalogue from Sotheby’s.